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A passion for frogs
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The scientist, S.D. Biju's recent discovery of a new species of frogs is a hot topic of discussion in the scientific world. In a chat with P. Venugopal.
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ARCHIMEDES CLIMBS into his bathtub and finds the water overflowing as he reclines into it. The next moment, he is out running naked on the street, crying `eureka, eureka'... Sir Isaac Newton sits under an apple tree enjoying a quiet evening. Down comes an apple hitting him smack on the head. He rubs his head and before the lump grows to its full size, his brain reels out the theory of gravitation... Such stories sometimes tend to simplify the effort that had gone into great discoveries. For S.D. Biju, a scientist at the Tropical Botanic Garden Research Institute at Palode, his discovery is the result of nine long years of arduous research in the Western Ghats forests. A purple, three-inch, snub-nosed, burrowing frog of the Western Ghats, which he and a Brussels-based evolutionary geneticist, Franky Bossuyt, recently reported in the British science magazine, Nature, is one of the hottest topics of discussion in the scientific world today.
The media world over splashed the discovery of Nasikabatrachus Sahyadrensis, as the new frog is christened, in the front page because of two reasons. First, only 29 families of frogs, encompassing approximately 4,800 species, were known till then. Most of these families were named by the mid-1800s and the last discovery of a species of frog belonging to a new family was in 1926. In other words, a new family is being reported after a gap of more than 75 years.
The second reason, which is more important, is the bio geographical significance of the find. The frog's internal anatomy and DNA sequence data place it deep in the family tree of frogs to the age of the dinosaurs. Its closest relatives now live in Seychelles, 3,000 km south of the Indian peninsula, suggesting that these two places were part of the same landmass during the time of the dinosaurs.
Says Dr. Biju, "India is believed to have been part of a southern super continent called Gondwana 160 million years ago. According to the theory of continental drift, Africa and South America separated from this super continent first. The land mass broke up further, with Antarctica and Australia drifting away 130 million years ago, Madagascar 90 million years ago and Seychelles 65 million years ago. This frog links India to Seychelles at that distant point of time."
The editors of Nature subsequently picked the story on Dr. Biju's frog, written by S. Blair Hedges, as one of the top three articles from among 325 published in the magazine's `News and Views' section during 2003. More exciting findings are sure to come from this Kerala scientist as he now joins Dr. Bossuyt at the University of Brussels for a four-year collaborative research project. Dr. Biju, who is basically a plant taxonomist with doctorate from the University of Calicut, has already discovered 115 new species of frogs, four new genera and one new family, all from the Western Ghats region. Of these, one family and two genera have been published in science journals and 30 species are under description. "The Western Ghats region, described as one of the 18 biodiversity hotspots of the world, is a treasure trove for biologists and botanists. More than anything else, my work shows but the inadequacy of the research that has gone into this region so far," says Dr. Biju modestly.
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Life
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Kochi
Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
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